The sorry betrayal of the victims of press abuse

Image: James Murdoch closes News of the World after phone hacking scandal (Surian Soosay/Flickr) - but what else has changed, after all that?

Last week the culture
minister Matt Hancock announced the government’s response to the public consultation on the Leveson
Inquiry and its implementation. The government announced it will not continue
with the Leveson Inquiry Part 2 that was supposed to consider corrupt relations
between police and media (the part of Leveson that was unable to proceed at the
time because of court cases that were ongoing). And it will repeal Section 40
of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 – the section that deals with effective press
regulation.

For those who
have lost track of this protracted process it is worth a quick flashback to November
2012 when the Leveson report was published after an 18 month inquiry.
Leveson detailed how the newspaper industry had become too
powerful and how meaningful reform was needed to restore public confidence.
Leveson emphasised that his recommendations were about enshrining press freedom
and ensuring that any subsequent regulatory system was independent from
government, albeit underpinned by statute. He also had to satisfy the many
victims of press abuse that his recommendations would bring about an
independent system with teeth, ensuring that the press could not “mark their
own homework”.

David Cameron’s U-turn in the face of press pressure

David Cameron had initially said he would implement the Leveson
recommendations unless they were “bonkers”.

The
press responded with simplistic invocations of “free speech”.

But
freedom without accountability is simply the freedom of the powerful over the
powerless. The freedom to run roughshod over people’s lives causing harm and
distress for the sake of increased sales and revenue. Freedom
of the press must be balanced by freedom of the public to assess and challenge
the nature of that communication. Democracy requires protective and enabling
legislation and that is why it exists in other areas of public life.

However Cameron soon caved in to the press lobby, saying that any
statutory underpinning to press regulation would be “crossing
the Rubicon”. Instead he opted for setting up a new
press self-regulatory body, not by statutory underpinning as Leveson had
recommended, but by Royal Charter.

Initially, it looked like the press lobby
were willing to accept this (it was, after all, devised in response to their
concerns), but when it became clear they couldn’t fully control the terms of
the Charter, powerful press interests soon repudiated it and backed away from
setting up self-regulators under its terms. Instead they revamped the
discredited Press Complaints Commission and called it the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO)
– an organisation run by the industry, outside of the Royal Charter system of
recognition, that meets fewer than half of Leveson’s recommendations.

This has been a consistent pattern
established over the last five years – where the Press appear to be sympathetic
to at least some of Leveson’s recommendations but over time repudiate most of
them and then proceed to do exactly as they like.

Where are we now?

This brings us to Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act – the section
that Matt Hancock has just announced the government will repeal.

A crucial part of the new Royal Charter system relied on
persuading the press to join a recognised regulator. Leveson knew this wouldn’t
be easy and so devised a system of carrots and sticks. Section 40 of the Crime
and Courts Act embeds this in law. Under this law, if a news publisher joins a
recognised regulator then access to low cost arbitration becomes mandatory,
removing the threat of potentially huge losses both for ordinary citizens harmed
by press behaviour, and for publishers threatened by a wealthy litigant (the
carrot). But if a newspaper refuses to join a recognised regulator and thereby
refuses to offer affordable access to justice, then they will be liable to pay
all court costs for cases against them (the stick). The new system of
regulation also includes protection against trivial and malicious claims, and
against local and regional publishers being caused financial hardship.

Section 40 is integral to the success of the Royal Charter
framework of press regulation and the press know it. Consequently, even after
Section 40 had become law (but had not yet come into force) much of the press
went on a propaganda offensive against it. Karen Bradley, then Secretary of State
for Culture, Media and Sport capitulated to increasing pressure by putting the
commencement of Section 40 – already agreed by parliament – back out to public
consultation. During this consultation period, the press engaged in a shutdown
of debate over media reform.

And this week, Matt Hancock has announced Section 40 will be
repealed. His government has given two reasons.

Firstly, they claim
that IPSO is doing a good job.

Really?

Why IPSO is failing

On February 20th,
just over a week before the government’s announcement, the Home Affairs Select Committee met to discuss the role of the press in
spreading “hate crime and its violent consequences”. In October 2016 the European Commission against Racism
and Intolerance Report on the UK stated: “Hate speech in some traditional media, particularly tabloid
newspapers, continues to be a problem, with biased or ill-founded information
disseminated about vulnerable groups, which may contribute to perpetuating
stereotypes…..It is no coincidence that racist violence is on the rise in the
UK at the same time as we see worrying examples of intolerance and hate speech
in the newspapers, online and even among politicians.”

One of the witnesses
to the Select Committee was Sir Alan Moses, Chair of IPSO. Moses explained that
IPSO had received 8,148 complaints in a single year relating to discrimination
but that only one of those had been
upheld. Moses said that this figure reflected the nature of Clause 12 of the Editors code that only allowed complaints of discrimination
to be upheld when they are made against individuals and not a group of people
such as Muslims, LGBTQ+, migrants, refugees, women etc. In other words it “gives license to general
discrimination by explicitly excluding it from its definition” (Moore and Ramsey, 2017).

So it’s fine to
invoke Nazi rhetoric by talking about “the Muslim problem” as Trevor Kavanagh (then
on IPSO’s Board) did in his column in The
Sun, for example.

The Editors’ code
committee is chaired by the editor of the Daily
Mail, Paul Dacre – the newspaper which has been found to have breached the
code most often. The committee revised the Code in 2015 and knew precisely what
it was doing. And so, it is perfectly happy to consider 8,148 complaints
relating to discrimination and say that there is not a problem.

Does digital really weaken press power?

Secondly, the government
argues in its response
to the consultation on the argument that the media landscape has changed.
So for example whilst “the percentage of adults reading online news, newspapers
or magazines has tripled from 20 per cent in 2007 to 64 per cent in 2017”, Ofcom
research shows that the percentage of adults who read newspapers (excluding
online versions) has fallen from “40% in 2013 to 21 per cent in 2016”.

The argument seems
to be that the power of the press is diminishing rapidly in the digital era and
we should no longer be worried about it.

But if many more people are reading news online why
exclude that readership from any analysis of the power of the press? Ofcom also
notes that the combined print and digital readership of the Daily Mail and Mail
on Sunday, The
Sun and The
Sun on Sunday, The
Times and the Sunday
Times, and the London
Evening Standard increased between 2015 and 2016.
Online intermediaries (such as Facebook and Google) most often amplify the
voice of dominant news brands because their algorithms prioritise mainstream
news content. Ofcom refer to data from Newscorp showing high levels of
consumption of their content through third-party platforms and note that
according to comScore’s News/Information category 68% of the total digital
audience access the Mail Online/the Daily Mail and 64% access The Sun Online. The
2017 (p.19) Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute also states that “[o]ur research suggests that the vast majority of news people consume
still comes from mainstream media and that most of the reasons for distrust
also relate to mainstream media.”

3 out of 4 people think press behaviour is the same or
worse since Leveson

It is probably because most people’s news
still comes from the mainstream news media that constant polling has shown high
levels of support for media reform and a firm rejection of press manoeuvring. A
poll
undertaken by YouGov for Hacked Off in January 2017, after an onslaught of
anti-press regulation coverage across all news media, still showed that 73 per
cent of the public thought press behaviour had either got worse or not changed
since the Leveson enquiry.

So why did the government consultation claim that most
responses (79%) favoured full repeal of Section 40? They chose to count only
‘direct responses’, many of which (they acknowledge) were the result of newspapers
encouraging readers to respond. Other organisations who encouraged members to
respond such as Avaaz and 38 Degrees - with a combined total of 200,428
responses all supporting Leveson 2 - were ignored because they were not considered
to be ‘direct respondents’. How convenient.

A history of failed press regulation

It is worth reflecting on the history of failed press regulation.
The first Royal Commission on the Press (1947-49) led to the press industry
creating the General Council of the Press (1953). Dissatisfaction led to the
second Royal Commission on the Press and to the General Council being replaced
by the Press Council in 1962. In 1972 the Younger Committee report on Privacy
was critical of the Press Council, which rejected their concerns. In 1974 a
third Royal Commission on the Press looked into editorial standards and freedom
of choice for consumers. It suggested a new written Code of Practice. The Press
Council again rejected the Commission’s suggestions. In 1990 the Calcutt Committee
was established to look into press intrusion. Calcutt recommended replacing the
Press Council with a new Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and a new Code of
Practice. In 1993 Calcutt reported on the progress of the PCC. He determined
that sufficient progress had not been made and recommended the introduction of
a Statutory Press Complaints Tribunal. Once more the press industry objected
and the government failed to act on the recommendation. In 1995 the National
Heritage Select Committee published a report on privacy and press intrusion and
made recommendations on a new Statutory Press Ombudsman. The press objected and
yet again the government yielded and rejected the recommendations. In 2009 the
PCC published a report in response to the Guardian phone hacking investigation
‘Phone Message Tapping Allegations’.
In July 2011 the Leveson Inquiry was announced. The discredited PCC was
replaced by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) and the
majority of the mainstream press signed up to it. But, IPSO refused to be part
of the system of press regulation under the Royal Charter.

What this history tells us is that the press have consistently
promised to self-regulate adequately and consistently failed to do so. The
government, keen to maintain good relations with the press, has consistently
bowed down to industry pressure. Only this time something is different. The
campaigns for media reform are now well established and reach across a vibrant
and angry civil society that believe society deserves a free, fair and
accountable press. We are not going away.

Natalie Fenton is a Professor in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is Co-Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and Co-Director of Goldsmiths Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. Her most recent book is Digital, Political, Radical (2016). She is on the Board of Directors of the campaign group Hacked Off and a founding member of the Media Reform Coalition.

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